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Rating: In the 1880s, a new art movement, the American Tonalism, emerged west of the Atlantic. Over its nearly 40-year lifespan, it produced some remarkable works. The movement originated from an intriguing blend of tonal painting, especially from the 14th-15th century Venetian school, and the French Barbizon style, prevalent in the mid-19th century. The new creation depicted landscapes, or elements of them, dominated by dark, "misty" color tones where neutral shades reigned supreme. Crushed by the immediate preceding European Impressionism, many likened Tonalism to American Impressionism, and from the equally immediate subsequent Modernism, this movement did not achieve the popularity it deserved. Yet, thanks to the artist I'm about to discuss, it was eventually re-evaluated over the years.
The curious thing, however, is that the most famous work of James Whistler is the one least akin to the movement of which he was, despite being English by adoption and only American by birth, among the founders: "Whistler's Mother," oil on canvas from 1871, in fact, not only predates the explosion of Tonalism by a few years but does not share its themes, such as landscapes, as previously mentioned. However, it anticipated the strong aesthetics dominated, as the author himself said, by "the supremacy of tonal harmony over the rest" and by the strongly symbolic absence of socio-cultural-political references outside the painting representation itself.
On one hand, the tonal harmony was a belief so strong that Whistler drew real similarities between his work and that of a musician: starting from the titles like "Arrangements," such as the painting at the heart of this review, and "Nocturnes," which occupy most of his catalog, and on the other hand, the living of painting, to express it as he loved to do so himself, as "art for art's sake", which ended up drawing parallels with literary environments like the Franco-Belgian Symbolist one.
To clarify these concepts further, just look at "Arrangement in Grey and Black": a strict female figure caught seated and in profile, who only appears to be the protagonist because in reality, she is just part of a choral ensemble: a well-known blog states that the true protagonist here is, to put it elegantly and not in the term used, misfortune. A jest from someone who grasped, albeit ironically, the technical essence: forms that balance one another, the square ones of the "furniture" harmonized, even chromatically, with the soft ones of the mother, her clothes, the chair, in an ensemble picture that appears, deceiving the inattentive eye, simple if not even trivial.
Realized in the full Victorian era, the painting was not loved by the English and only in French hands, where it still resides at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris, did it gain appreciation over the years, although, as is right, it was never completely "interpreted." Whistler limited his comment to a laconic "an act of filial love" and has been the subject of endless parodies. These parodies made it much more popular than its intrinsic technical value, in addition to being yet another Pop icon, Mr. Bean exemplifies, but they did not tarnish its strong artistic morality.
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